Chicago's South Side Blues-Scape - Geographies of Privilege - page 53

rificcore“ghetto”(Vankatesh2004;Wacquant2008).Butnow,governance-ledredevel-
opment pushes a restructuring by proclaiming something compelling: a rich South Side
history. Beneath troubled and struggling neighborhoods, they declare, are industrious
and sturdy communities whose histories and social bases need resurrection.
This chapter examines this elite-privileging transformation on Chicago's South Side
as one exemplar of a national trend. Chicago, paralleling developments in cities like
Cleveland, St. Louis, Boston, Washington, DC, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Phil-
adelphia, now experiences this transformation that moves far beyond the downtown
(Grazian 2005; Wilson 2012). An elaborate rhetoric (as important as an incipient phys-
ical and social restructuring), rooted in a race-class privilege, introduces a bold middle-
class commercializing in blues blocks. These city sections, for decades systematically
isolated and deemed peripheral by the City as historic storehouses for the racialized
poor,aresuddenlybeingrhetoricallyrecastashistoric,“culturallysalvageable,”andripe
for inclusion in deepening “go-global” resculpting efforts. A “rediscovery of the black
experience”nowincreasinglycenters“blackculture,”“rawbluesmusicalperformance,”
and “exotic black ways” as objects of bourgeois fascination. This group, it seems, has
found a new playground for reverie and spectatorship. The pull to these clubs, it is sug-
gested, is inexorably compelling for any normatively functioning person.
This chapter interrogates possible futures for these clubs and the process by which
this privilege works through them. My goal is twofold: to understand how this kind of
privilege (now unfolding across the vastness of urban America) operates on the ground
of these clubs and to discover what this blues-scape will become. On both counts, there
is far too little understanding (Brown 2006; Phillips 2010). A detailed, ethnographic
analysis of one paradigmatic South Side club suggests, first, that this drive to upscale
and commodify the place “hits the ground” of these venues through a complex human
mediative process. In particular, I chronicle that the central decision-maker of club fu-
ture, the club owner, builds a sense of self, club realities, and the world out of negoti-
ating, internalizing, and working through three forces: neoliberal subject realities, gov-
ernmentality, and the constitution of class-race identities. These three forces, with deep
multiscaler connections to institutions and forces outside the club, are the anchoring
framesforthehumanproductionofknowledgethatwilldetermineclubownerdecisions
about the kind and intensity of club commodifying. 1 As I show, these interconnecting,
blurringforcesstructuretheowner'sproductionofknowledgeandunderstandingsabout
herself (sense of ideal identity, desires, needs, values) and her club (sense of the ideal
club, sense of patrons, sense of ideal patrons, sense of ideal club practices and customs)
that shapes something important: her decision about venue change. My empirical focus,
Beebe's on Chicago's South Side, excavates the power and pervasiveness of these col-
liding forces. 2